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“Communication is a two-way street”
Instructors’ perceptions of student apologies
Dongmei Cheng
Texas A&M University-Commerce
Speech act studies are increasingly likely to use retrospective verbal protocols
to record the thoughts of participants who produced targeted speech acts
(e.g., Cohen & Olshtain, 1993). However, although communication is always
a two-way street, little is known about the recipients’ perceptions of speech
acts. In academic communication at universities, it is critical for students to
gain awareness of the socio-cultural norms as well as knowledge of appropriate
linguistic forms in interacting with instructors. Therefore, gathering percep-
tual information from instructors, the recipients of many speech acts such as
apologies, serves an important role in realizing successful student-instructor
communication. Targeting instructors’ perceptions, two forms of an online
survey were created via surveygizmo.com, with one including 12 spoken apol-
ogies and the other including 12 emailed apologies. An equal number of native
(NS) and nonnative English speaking (NNS) students produced these apolo-
gies. The 150 instructors who responded to the survey gave significantly higher
ratings to apologies made by NS students than to those made by NNS students.
An analysis of instructors’ explanations after the ratings showed that both
sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic knowledge (Thomas, 1983) were valued
in the successful realization of apologies, with the majority of instructor expla-
nations addressing the sociopragmatic aspects of apology productions. In their
comments on highly-rated student apologies, instructors appreciated the fact
that students took responsibility in apologizing, offered worthy explanations,
and delivered the messages with minimum grammatical mistakes. Poorly rated
apology messages did not contain sufficient or valid evidence, inconvenienced
the instructors through inappropriate requests, and usually had multiple gram-
matical mistakes. This study provides useful source of information to be used
in university classrooms that can orientate novice learners towards socio-cul-
tural expectations and appropriate lexical markers to be employed in making
successful apologies in academic settings.
Keywords: apologies, perceptions, instructors’ ratings, online survey
Pragmatics 27:1 (2017), 1–32. doi 10.1075/prag.27.1.01che
issn 1018-2101 / e-issn 2406-4238 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
2 Dongmei Cheng
1. Introduction
Apologies are one of the most commonly occurring speech acts in our daily lives
that carry important functions. One chooses to apologize to maintain good re-
lationships with others when an offense was made due to one’s own responsibil-
ity. Apologies are closely connected with multiple social factors, as mentioned
in Brown and Levinson’s (1978) theory of politeness. These factors include the
ranking of the imposition, or R (how serious the offense is), the relative power
of the hearer over the speaker, or P (e.g., doctor vs. patient or professor vs. stu-
dent), and the social distance between the participants, or D (relatives, friends, or
strangers). Because of these social variables, the realizations of apologies among
speakers also drastically vary. Depending on the situation and the speaker, an
explicit expression of apology may not be sufficient (e.g., I’m sorry or I apologize);
one may need to provide as an explanation or an account (e.g., I was sick yesterday.)
and to make a request to repair the wrongdoing (e.g., would it be possible for us to
arrange another meeting?)
This study investigates student apologies to instructors in the U.S. university
context. University instructors are a group of people who encounter a high fre-
quency of apology messages on a daily basis, with the majority of these messages
coming from students. Those of us who have taught for a while can all testify this
by simply opening our emails or recalling the end-of-class or office hour conver-
sations. Most student apologies are course-work related, such as missing a lecture,
missing an appointment, and turning in an important assignment late (Cheng
2013). These scenarios are often considered as crucial because they may jeopardize
a student’s grade and ultimate success in a course. Success or failure in apologizing,
therefore, has a potentially large influence on communication between students
and instructors, and this communication could enhance or hinder the academic
performance of the students. Cultural differences also play an important part
in students’ apologies to their instructors. Nonnative speakers of English might
quite possibly encounter difficulties in apologizing in a socially acceptable and
linguistically appropriate way.
Native English speakers growing up in the United States, however, do not
naturally express good apologies either. As Engel (2001) has mentioned, due to the
lack of attention to teaching apology as an important social skill in both family and
school education, many people growing up in the United States do not even know
“how to make a genuine apology” (p. 38). To make the situation worse, many do
not realize the necessity of an apology when they have offended others. In univer-
sity contexts, if the student has done something wrong that creates trouble for the
instructor, a lack of an apology is sometimes even worse than making a linguisti-
cally problematic one. Apologies are important social skills for university students
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Communication is a two-way street 3
in contemporary society. In preparation to enter the workforce after graduating
from college, university students are expected to behave under the general prin-
ciple of “professionalism”, defined as the demonstration of good characteristics of
self-regulation and self-motivation possessed by trained professionals or learners
who behave in socially appropriate ways within their own professional or learning
communities (Evetts 2003; Swart et al. 2009). Students’ successful realization of
apologies when necessary is a good indicator of professionalism, showing that
they act like professionals in their own academic fields who possess the ability to
reflect on their own mistakes and progress. In academic communication at uni-
versities, it is critical for students to gain sociocultural and linguistic awareness
while apologizing to instructors. Perceptual information from instructors, as the
addressees of student apologies, provides important insights for the success in
communication between students and instructors.
2. Background
The speech act of apologies is closely connected to the concept of politeness.
Politeness, according to Brown and Levinson (1978), is related to individuals’
self-esteem, or face needs. Two major strategies of politeness include satisfying
other’s wishes of being liked or admired (i.e., positive politeness) and respecting
other’s freedom of action (i.e., negative politeness). The politeness theory repre-
sents some universals in language usage in Western societies, especially in the
English language and is often used to address speech act performances. Certain
speech acts are considered as face-threatening because they either put pressure on
the addressee (e.g., orders, requests, and suggestions) or sacrifice the public image
of the speaker (e.g., apologies, thanks, and acceptances of compliments). Other
face-threatening acts (FTAs) go against the rules of positive politeness by showing
little care of the addressee’s feelings or wants (e.g., criticisms and disagreements)
or damaging the speaker’s own public image of a well-rounded human being (e.g.,
apologies and confessions).
Miscommunication often occurs when there is a lack of pragmatic aware-
ness. Thomas (1983) states the reason for pragmatic failure as the speaker’s “in-
ability to understand ‘what is meant by what is said’” (p. 91). According to her,
there are two kinds of pragmatic failures: When the failure results from a lack of
linguistic knowledge, it is referred to as pragmalinguistic failure (e.g., a speaker
is not able to make a conventional indirect request because he/she does not know
how to use modal verbs). Another type of pragmatic failure is due to speaker’s
insufficient sociocultural knowledge of the target language community (e.g., a
speaker’s request is often too direct because he/she thinks that only direct forms
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4 Dongmei Cheng
are preferred in the target culture). These two categories reflect the complex
nature of pragmatic performance, which draws from both the linguistic and
sociocultural knowledge of a speaker.
The goal of speech act research is to describe the pragmalinguistic and so-
ciopragmatic features of certain speaker groups, to guide pragmatic instruction,
and ultimately to enhance cultural awareness and understanding and to enlighten
cross-cultural and intercultural communication. In order for these goals to be
achieved, it is important to know the perceptions of not only the speaker/writer but
also the listener/reader of the targeted speech acts, because audience perceptions
always play an important role in communication successes or failures.
Audience perceptions of communication effectiveness, a more general area
incorporating the scope of speech act perceptions, have been commonly as-
sessed in communication studies. Littlemore (2003) has described three aspects
of communicative effectiveness for second language learners of English: (1) ease
of comprehension (how easy is it to work out what this person is talking about?);
(2) stylishness of expression (how stylish is this person’s language?); and (3) pro-
ficiency (how would you rate this person’s level of English?). Based on students’
spoken output, raters were given multiple options (e.g., for ease of comprehension,
very difficult, quite difficult, average, quite easy, very easy). Results of Littlemore
(2003) showed that learners who demonstrate analytic cognitive styles are judged
by native speakers of English as more effective in their communications than those
who use holistic cognitive styles.
Speech act studies are increasingly likely to use retrospective verbal protocols
to record the thoughts of participants who produced targeted speech acts (Cohen
& Olshtain 1993; Félix-Brasdefer 2008). Also, audience perceptions of speech act
performance have been examined in a few studies (Economidou-Kogetsidis 2011;
Eslami & Eslami-Rasekh 2008; Ishihara 2009; Taguchi 2003, 2011; Tateyama 2001).
However, none of these studies have focused on apology as a targeted speech act.
For frequently occurring speech acts like apologies, which affect the apologizer’s
goals or interpersonal relationships with others, it is particularly important to
obtain perceptual information from the addressees. This information helps to
facilitate smoother communication and can provide valuable insights for material
development in teaching and assessing speech acts.
Economidou-Kogetsidis (2011) incorporated an online questionnaire to gath-
er quantitative and qualitative data on audience perceptions of request emails.
Twenty-four lecturers in universities in the U.K. were asked to rate and comment
on “the politeness and/or appropriateness” of six natural request emails written
by students (p. 3199). To reduce the various effects of different degrees of social
distance perceived by the participants, they were “instructed to imagine that they
received the emails from one of their students with whom they are familiar but
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Communication is a two-way street 5
not close to” (p. 3199). Two dimensions were included in the 5-point Likert scale
ratings: politeness and abruptness. Unfortunately, the author did not provide fur-
ther explanations on the operationalization of these two dimensions. Qualitative
data were also collected via comments made by the lecturers, who were asked to
“explain their choice for [the ratings] by making reference to specific linguistic
features from the [email]” (p. 3199). Results showed that the majority of student
emails were perceived as too direct and had zero marking to downgrade the effect
of the requests or just used the word “please”. The NNS students in this study were
judged as unprepared to send appropriate request emails to faculty members.
Another study including the addressees’ perceptions was conducted by
Ishihara (2009). Introducing a teacher-learner collaborative assessment tool, this
study utilized the EFL teacher’s comments as interpretations of the appropriate-
ness of requests produced by learners in written discourse completion tasks. The
teacher was the only audience member of the request performances in this study;
however, this is not unusual in an EFL context where students rarely have contact
with native English speakers. The teacher’s written evaluations included a glob-
al score on appropriateness and additional comments on what native speakers
would say or how they might react in the same situation, as well as other strategies
and word choices that could be considered. Learners of this study were shown to
demonstrate increasing awareness of contextual variables and pragmalinguistic
details in producing English speech acts. This type of classroom assessment also
helped learners to realize the differences between their own intentions and listen-
ers’ perceptions.
Most speech act studies reporting audience perceptions have been based on
raters’ perspectives (Eslami & Eslami-Rasekh 2008; Taguchi 2003, 2011; Tateyama
2001). In the studies by Eslami and Eslami-Rasekh (2008) and Tateyama (2001),
two raters were included and both were native speakers of the target language.
Speech act ratings were not the center of these studies but were included as a way
to assess learners’ pragmatic abilities. These studies provided scant description of
the rating criteria and process. Both used a 5-point Likert scale and were based on
the holistic impressions of the raters. Taguchi’s (2003) study included a detailed
speech act rating scale on the appropriateness of requests and refusals produced in
role-plays. Six native-English-speaking raters who were experienced ESL teachers
rated L2 speakers’ pragmatic ability in two aspects: “sociopragmatics (i.e., the abil-
ity to evaluate contextual cues) and pragmalinguistics (i.e., the ability to choose
appropriate linguistic expressions)” (p. 70). A rubric with 6-point rating scales
was provided, with descriptions of the contextual, grammatical, and discourse
variables of the targeted speech acts, as well as corresponding examples for each
scale. Ratings from these studies help us to understand how native speakers view
the pragmatic performance of second language learners; however, the fact that
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6 Dongmei Cheng
only a limited number of speech act raters were present makes it impossible to
generalize the results to a larger group.
A more complete picture of speech act assessment has been provided by
Ishihara (2010), who targeted classroom assessment of ESL learners’ pragmatic
ability. Both a holistic rubric and an analytic rubric were provided for assessment
conducted by the classroom teacher, peers, or student themselves, incorporating
seven major aspects: understanding of sociocultural norms; organization of the
message (i.e., discourse markers; directness, politeness, and formality); grammar
strategies; semantic moves; word choice; and tone, including both verbal and non-
verbal tone. Ishihara (2010) also provided a specific rubric on assessing apologies,
using a 4-point scale on the following four aspects: level of formality; strategies of
apologizing (e.g. expressing apology, acknowledging responsibility, giving expla-
nation, offering repair, promising nonreoccurrence); word choice; and tone (facial
expression, tone of voice, gestures).
Taguchi (2011) explored different rater characteristics in assessing pragmat-
ic performance. Four native English speakers from different ethnic-racial back-
grounds completed the rating of oral DCT recordings produced by 48 Japanese
EFL learners using a five-point rating scale addressing overall appropriateness.
Rater variations were revealed from the retrospective verbal protocols conduct-
ed after the global rating. Raters were found to focus on different aspects while
rating learners’ pragmatic performance. Some raters placed more emphasis on
linguistic forms such as the use of politeness markers, whereas others based their
rating decisions on non-linguistic factors such as the semantic strategies used in
constructing the content of the speech. Results also revealed the influences from
raters’ personal experiences on their scoring decisions. An important implication
from the results of this study is that native speakers did not form a unified voice on
pragmatic ratings. Raters are unique individuals with different perspectives, which
should be observed and valued in assessing speech act performance. How raters’
social backgrounds relates to their perceptions of learners’ speech act performance
is an empirical question that warrants further investigations.
Previous research has been scarce in revealing the recipients’ perceptions of
salient speech acts like apologies. Knowing this perceptual information from the
other end will help us to re-envision communication as a two-way street and to
provide participants with insights on social-cultural appropriateness in the new
environment they have just entered. This new environment is set up as a broad
academic setting on a university campus. The main inquiry of the current study
is on instructors’ perceptions of student apology productions, which includes the
following two research questions and sub-questions:
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Communication is a two-way street 7
1. How do instructors from different backgrounds rate the communicative ef-
fectiveness of student emailed and spoken apologies?
1.1 Do instructors give different ratings to apologies produced by NSs and
NNSs?
1.2 Do instructors of different ranks (i.e., graduate teaching assistant, non-
tenure-track faculty; tenure-track/tenured faculty) give different ratings
to student apologies?
1.3 Do instructors of different age groups (i.e., 20–30, 31–40, 41–50, 51 and
above years old) give different ratings to student apologies?
1.4 Do instructors give different ratings to spoken apologies and emailed
apologies?
2. How do the instructors explain their ratings?
2.1 What types of explanations do instructors give?
2.2 What are the qualities of highly rated student apologies, according to the
instructors?
2.3 What are the characteristics of poorly rated student apologies, according
to the instructors?
3. Methodology
3.1 Online survey of instructor perceptions of student apologies
An online survey of instructor perceptions was developed via surveygizmo.com.
The title of the survey avoided using the word “apologies” due to the different
reactions it might cause to responders; instead, a title with a broader scope was
used: “Instructor Perceptions of Academic Communication.” Student apologies
included in the online survey came from a pool of spoken and emailed apologies
produced by native English speaking (NS) students (n = 60), recruited from low-
er- (100–200 level) and upper-level (300–400 level) university classes at the same
university as the instructor participants and nonnative English speaking (NNS)
students (n = 63), recruited from the local Intensive English Program. To collect
the pool of apologies, student participants were asked to respond in emailed or
spoken form to three coursework-related situations that are most likely to generate
apologies: missing an important lecture, missing an important appointment, and
turning in an important assignment late. A total of 369 apologies messages were
elicited from student participants; more specifically, 189 emailed apologies and
180 spoken apologies that were audio recorded and then transcribed.
© 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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8 Dongmei Cheng
Two forms of the online survey were created, with one including 12 spoken
apologies in audio files and the other including 12 emailed apologies. The sampling
of spoken apologies included only male students to avoid any potential gender ef-
fects on listeners’ judgments. Males were chosen because the student participants
contributed to the apologies were mostly male, and the same gender was selected for
the NS group to match with the NNS group. The 12 apologies in each survey were
produced by 6 NSs and 6 NNSs. All three situations (i.e., missed lecture, missed ap-
pointment, and late assignment) were equally represented in these apologies. A test
item was provided at the beginning of each survey to familiarize the participants
with the survey format. Sample screenshots of the two forms of survey are displayed
in Appendix A. All apologies used in the survey are presented in Appendix B.
Instructors were asked to conduct a global rating on the communicative ef-
fectiveness of each student apology message. The decision to use one global scale
was informed by extensive pilot tests of more complex scales, including five com-
ponents: comprehensibility, fluency, politeness, appropriateness, and accuracy.
Results of the pilot tests revealed high corrections of instructors’ rating scores on
all the above components, which were then combined into one global scale, com-
municative effectiveness. Communicative effectiveness is defined as an instructor’s
perception of how successfully an apology is executed, considering the speaker’s
social-cultural awareness, via the use of semantic strategies (e.g., explicit expres-
sion of apologies and offers of repair), organization of the content, word choices,
fluency, and intonation (Littlemore 2003). Each survey item includes two parts: The
first part is a Likert scale question on how effective the student’s communication is
in a given apology sample and four choices (i.e., not effective, somewhat ineffective,
somewhat effective, and effective). The 4-point Likert scale was chosen for two rea-
sons: (1) An even-number, 4-point scale would avoid the tendency of participants
choosing the middle number due to convenience or uncertainty. (2) Although
increasing the points might result in more precise ratings, this in turn would re-
quire a longer reaction time. A 4-point scale, compared to a more precise scale, is
cognitively less demanding and more efficient for the instructor participants. After
the rating, an open-ended question is presented, asking the instructor to list the
reasons why they gave the rating. While the Likert scale question was obligatory,
instructors had the option to skip the open-ended question if they wish.
3.2 Participants
The participants in this study were all university instructors at a large public uni-
versity in Southwest U.S. during the time of the data collection. To recruit in-
structor participants, an email was first sent out with a description of this study
© 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Communication is a two-way street 9
and the links of both the spoken and emailed apology surveys to each instructor
contacted. The participant had the choices to answer either form of the survey. A
total of 150 instructors responded and completed the survey. Their demographic
characteristics are shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Characteristics of instructor participants (N = 150) in the online survey
Emailed apology Spoken apology Total
# of participants
Gender Female 59 31 90
Male 41 19 60
Rank Tenured/tenure-track 38 21 59
Non tenure-track 35 16 51
Graduate assistant 27 13 40
Age 20–30 years old 22 13 35
31–40 14 9 23
41–50 23 11 34
51 and above 41 17 58
Language NS 90 42 132
NNS 10 8 18
Years of Teaching Mean (SD) 10.70 (9.28) 38.52 (21.98) 24.61 (15.63)
The spoken apology survey contains embedded audio files and due to this more
complicated feature, fewer instructors chose to respond to it, compared to the
instructors who answered the emailed apology survey. As seen in Table 1, the
average years of teaching experiences of instructors who responded to the spoken
survey was much larger than the ones who responded to the emailed survey. Since
the sampling method did not control the instructors’ L1 background, more NS
instructors than NNS instructors participated.
3.3 Analysis
All instructor participants’ responses were automatically saved through the sur-
vey website, surveygizmo.com. The rating scores obtained in this study, which
represent instructors’ attitudes towards students’ apologies, were treated as inter-
val scales to allow for the use of parametric statistics, following McKay (2006),
attitudinal scales are often treated as interval scales in statistical analysis. The
four choices in the Likert scale questions were converted into numerical data for
individual participants (i.e., not effective = 1; somewhat ineffective = 2; somewhat
effective = 3; and effective = 4). Means and standard deviations were calculated on
instructors’ rating scores. A paired-sample t-test was used to test the differences
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